I live in a neighborhood on the north side of Indianapolis. It’s a couple miles north of downtown, but it’s still in the city proper. It’s bounded on the north side by the trendy Broad Ripple arts-and-entertainment district, but it’s mostly quiet residential side streets.
Why do I bring this up? Well, it has to do with risk profiling. Living here since 2008 has kept my risk profile low, but over the last five years, since the “Time of the ‘Rona,” it’s actually plummeted even more.
These days, I mostly venture out of the neighborhood to go to the outdoor range, visit friends or travel. (I’ll note that I specify the “outdoor range” because my nearest indoor range, Indy Arms Company, is barely a mile from my door.)
I spend so much time on foot or riding my bicycle in the neighborhood that occasionally my car battery will go nearly dead because I haven’t driven it for a month or more in the cold season.
When I’m afoot in the neighborhood, there’s a calculus at work: What does my realistic threat profile look like?
For starters, I tend to walk only to one of the local eateries for lunch. From there, I either walk straight home or maybe stop off at the grocery store on the way there. Either way, I’m back in before dark. Most stuff that I can’t get from the local supermarket, I order online.
So, I’m hardly ever in big-box stores or malls, and I’m certainly never in mall food courts on the weekends or night clubs in the evenings. What, then, am I carrying a gun to protect myself from in the first place? I’m living what retired cop and firearms trainer Darryl Bolke calls “the snubby lifestyle.”
My most likely encounter will be a strongarm robbery or other assault, perpetrated by one to three attackers. In broad daylight in a residential neighborhood, blocks from the nearest police station, those sorts of assailants rarely stick around once the shooting has started.
It’s vanishingly unlikely that violent crime is going to touch me, given the constraints and protections I’ve set up around the opportunities for it to do so. If it does, it’s the sort that’s tailor-made for the snubby or a pocket pistol to solve.
Now, given that info and the fact that I am previously on record as hating the idea of a “carry rotation,” it’s reasonable to ask why I, back in late October, put away my six-round Taurus revolvers and started carrying a compact 9 mm semi-automatic pistol.
Well, circumstances changed. There was a lot of tension in the run-up to the Presidential election. People were keyed up and stressed. No matter which side won or lost, pretty much half of everybody was going to be mad. Street protests or violence were unlikely, but not outside the realm of possibility. At any rate, until things settled down some, I felt a little better carrying a sidearm with a double-digit magazine capacity and, preferably, a red-dot sight. I’ve used this setup to engage targets out past typical handgun ranges in classes and also know that it can be reloaded speedily with a spare magazine stowed in a hip pocket.
I used to carry like this all the time, but there’s no denying it’s more of a hassle and less comfortable than a compact wheelgun and a speedstrip in a jeans pocket, and I’ll be happy to get back to something a little less bulky, but I’ll wait until my personal Terror Alert Threat Level is back to Low from its current reading, somewhere between Guarded and Elevated.
Another example of my non-rotation rotation is that I keep a larger pistol with an MRDS and a weapon-mounted light (WML) for two reasons:
The first reason is prosaic. Namely that while my preferred course of action in the case of an intruder in the house is to fort up with a long gun in the bedroom and call the cops, there are potential scenarios where I might need to move through the house instead, and in those cases I would much prefer to have a hand free for doorknobs, telephones, rounding up pets or shepherding good guys and other activities.
The other use for that pistol is for the one or two times a year when I find myself in a large and crowded public venue, particularly one with poor lighting. I can’t think of any scenario where I’d less want to be limited to only a 3-inch-barreled wheelgun than engaging moving targets at 20-plus yards in low light amongst panicked people.
There’s also the lightweight revolver I keep in an outer coat pocket in winter, which I’ve discussed in this column before. If I’m walking three blocks to lunch in 20-degree weather, my coat is going to be zipped up, and that means my coat pocket gun is now my primary.
So, there’s the difference between a rotation and a battery of specialized and appropriate tools. In the former, you’re changing your carry gun at random to match your mood or your socks or whatever. While it’s a free country and you can do that if you want, it’s not a thing I’d advise.
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